I grew up in Cheyenne, WY. When I first moved to Oklahoma at the age of 18, I was struck immediately by how gregarious people seemed. Some of that might have been attributed to the shy nature of my mother, who isn’t one to willingly glad-hand any crowds. And so our family wasn’t thrown into many of those conventional social gauntlets you often have to learn to maneuver.
One Oklahoma evening I ventured out for church “visitation.” An older gentlemen and I took the information card of someone who had previously visited and were going to make a house call. As we turned to go I asked him, “Aren’t we going to call them first?“ “Oh no,” he replied, “they’ll ask us not to come.”
Intrusion is a way of life in the south.
I met my wife while I was working in a church in Baton Rouge in college. The two of us landing in Shawnee suits us in that Oklahoma isn’t quite the south nor the west, but a strange hybrid of the two. If I were to wear a bolo tie to church in Wyoming, the only thought any one might have is how nice I looked. If I wore the same in Baton Rouge, it might stir up a quiet embarrassment. In Oklahoma, it would generally leave folks befuddled. In that regard, our home is a geographical oddity in the way it suits us.
Shawnee, OK is a county seat once considered a farming town. The two religious universities it hosts, one Southern Baptist, the other Catholic, now mostly define it to outsiders. And their presence creates an interesting mix of progressive thinking and small town religious hesitation. Not entirely a bad place to live if you think walking the narrow path means balancing your life between extremes. I think that is exactly what it means.
I am a husband, a father, a friend, an Episcopal Youth minister, and a song-writer. I like rain and cloud cover, baseball, and the sound a banjo makes. I like a hard bitter pilsner in the summer, a heavy ale in the winter time, and a wee dram of single malt on any given Wednesday or Sunday night. I Iove any combination of chocolate and peanut butter or black coffee and lemon dessert. Pat Conroy novels are a guilty pleasure.
I wish I could sing harmony better than I do, and I live under the suspicion that the better I get at hearing and singing harmonies, the more mature I am growing spiritually. That applies only to me, in my estimation. Your gage is surely something else entirely.
